Imagine

It’s been a busy week and there hasn’t been much time for hitting the keys.

I even managed to miss the 30th anniversary of the killing of John Lennon. Not that I forgot, but just didn’t have time to say anything about it or reflect on the ongoing significance of Lennon’s life and music. I was going to ask Chris Evans about it when I stood in at the last minute to do Pause for Thought on his Radio 2 breakfast show yesterday morning (Friday) – he once expressed to me the irony of John Lennon writing ‘Imagine no possessions’ at a massively expensive piano in a massively expensive house on a massively expensive estate. But, he had Rick Astley (who neither gave us up nor let us down) and the very funny Peter Kay in the studio and there wasn’t time.

On the way to the BBC studios I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get through the streets around Oxford Circus because of the violence of the previous night’s riots and destruction over education cuts and increased university fees. But, the roads were clear and all evidence of trouble had been cleared away. Anyway, I got there, did the broadcast and then carried on in a cafe with a meeting about interfaith work in Kazakhstan. Weird, I know.

The script I did on Friday was about Advent: Putting the waiting back into wanting. I nicked the phrase from a major credit card advert from some years ago which promised to ‘take the waiting out of wanting’ (while failing to point out that the ensuing unnecessary debt might eventually be bad for you). Advent beckons us to slow down and not rush the story: don’t get to Christmas before you’ve worked through the story that makes sense of it. After all, you can’t get to summer without going through spring.

These are not actually random thoughts about the last week. Each event is connected by at least one idea: imagination.

John Lennon, for all his absurdities, hypocrisies and contradictions (for which he is not exactly unique…) at least imagined a world that was different from the one he lived in. Yes, some of this was more fantasy than hope, but his restlessness with how things actually are compelled him to imagine a different world.

It looks like the genuine anger and frustration of students is being hijacked by the usual ‘let’s-spark-a-riot’ suspects. But, it also seems that underneath all this protesting lies a genuine frustration with the way things are and the apparent impotence of ordinary people to do anything about it. Put bluntly, I wonder if the (unarticulated?) root of this anger is that the generation that created – and benefitted from – the disastrous greed culture of the last couple of decades is now compelling the succeeding generations to pay the price for this massive miscalculation. A case of ‘the sins of the fathers (and grandfathers) being visited on succeeding generations of the innocent? Dissatisfaction with the way things are provokes a casting around for what might be.

This longing for a different future seems to be fundamental to human existence. It’s almost as if we are made that way. Augustine recognised it when he said that ‘Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in [God]’. Maybe it is the same impulse that makes us pursue the scientific, philosophical or anthropological project – the restless search for understanding why the world is the way it is and why it came to be this way.

And this is where Advent comes in. Christmas is meaningless if it is just the pointless (if touching) story of a baby being born out of wedlock. Advent offers four weeks in which we can rehearse the story – of people’s experience of God, the world and each other – which then make the Christmas events comprehensible and explicable. Four weeks in which we get to put the waiting (for God coming among us as one of us) back into wanting (the light we keep hoping, working and longing for).

We anticipate Christmas. But we won’t rush it. Because we need the time and space to allow our imagination to be re-shaped – beginning to see the way the world could be, the person I could become.

Imagination isn’t fantasy. Imagination is what some of us think God applied when he said, “Let it be” and smiled with pleasure at what emerged.

“Put bluntly, I wonder if the (unarticulated?) root of this anger is that the generation that created – and benefitted from – the disastrous greed culture of the last couple of decades is now compelling the succeeding generations to pay the price for this massive miscalculation.”

No, it wasn’t “the generation”, it was the 13 years of the previous Labour government, led by ‘Education Education Education’ Blair and Brown which came up with the crazy political notion of putting 50% of 18 years old into university education, instead of them entering or training for trades and professions. Now you have many young people of lower ability “trained” for graduate work that doesn’t exist and burdened with debt, and the previous system near collapse.

By “previous system” I meant of course the old university system and the liberal idea of higher education. Lots of useless courses proliferated in the new universities, like tourism and media studies, while the sciences shrank or disappeared. Young people who couldn’t spell or write grammatically were now in university. Suddenly everybody had to be a graduate – even police, paramedics and nannies. Why? Of course, the economy never grew to accommodate these new graduates, while the meaning of a ‘degree’ changed as well.

Nick, I was interested that you *avoided the political point! – which is the proximate cause of the fees and funding crisis. (Otherwise, let’s just blame everything on Adam – who blames Eve – who blames the snake – who presumably blames God? 🙂 ) The Conservatives were also at fault for treating higher education like a commodity, which filled the new universities with cheap courses for poor students without the traditional hard subjects like science, maths or foreign languages, while expensive science departments without prestige funding got axed. In pushing so many young people – whether suited or not – into ‘Higher Education’ and massive debt, Britain has followed America, which has the best and worst higher education in the world. But in America, parents have had 18 years to save for this! and student funding is still a mess….

Steve, I agree and was going to add this note when I got home and onto my computer! The trend was set by Thatcher and the hope that new Labour would rescind some of the nonsense was hugely disappointed – in some areas of education policy and practice they made it worse. The lack of distinction between ‘university’ and ‘polytechnic’ betrayed a philosophical shallowness for which we now pay a heavy price.

Incidentally, the reason I didn’t major on the political point in my post was that I was simply using it illustratively in order to say something about Advent, imagination and hope.

“The lack of distinction between ‘university’ and ‘polytechnic’ betrayed a philosophical shallowness for which we now pay a heavy price.”

I agree. Maybe they thought they could undo some of the snobbery and elitism that has long bedevilled British society by democratizing the idea of going to university. But what you got was non-academic kids from middle class homes going to university instead of training to be bank clerks, nurses, sales assistants, technicians etc. It seems strange that the country that used to be the workshop of the world should have shortages in technical and building skills and bring in skilled Polish workers, while lots of its own young people lack skills and employment.
The danger now is that able kids from poor homes will be put off going to uni by the fees.
Well, Happy Christmas anyway, and don’t feel too bad about the football.

When is it right to imagine, wait and hope, and when is it right to act?

I can imagine some things about a better world, a “Good Society” if you will. I try not to delude myself with the idea that I can change much single-handedly, but am not under the impression that waiting in hope will be sufficient. I am not convinced that imagining a better world without expressing that in our actions and words is anything other than escapist fantasy. Imagine, wait, hope — what do these mean to the hungry if we refuse to feed them, to the homeless if we refuse to shelter them? We need to have hope, we need to be patient, we need to imagine a better way of living together, but we are called to give the hungry, the thirsty, the lonely, the frightened, the infirm and the bereaved some reason to have hope, and I don’t think we can do that by imagination alone.

Maybe that’s all a bit Pelagian. Christian doctrine as I understand it dictates that God loves us unconditionally, that our salvation is not based on works. But surely knowing God’s love for us should make us yearn toward sharing as much as we can without delay? Surely we should run, not walk, to help one another?

And yet I sleep in a warm bed while others are on the streets. Lord have mercy.

Kathryn, I don’t think (and didn’t mean to imply) that imagining, waiting and hoping involve doing nothing. To imagine a different ‘world’ surely means to live in such a way as to make it real – in the small and big things of ordinary life. To wait is not the same as just hanging around waiting for someone else to do something – an abdication of responsibility. To hope is anything but inactive – it is about ‘bringing the kingdom in’.

Your point about the need for the arts etc is well made but I suppose that the point may be that the obviously “affordable through relevance” (and I acknowledge the imprecision of the idea) might attract the first priority for funding, whereas that which may be more about an individual’s desire/need for self fulfilment is likely to be a lower priority in catastrophically chronic economic times.

What might have a fuzzy edge when 5% of the population went to university may be more challenging when that proportion ( and cost) rises to 50%.

Nick, I didn’t mean to imply that you implied waiting is an abdication of responsibility. You didn’t. You even wrote of the light we keep working for.

My criticisms are more of myself. I do not find myself a patient person, but I don’t lack imagination. Yet I really do struggle to discern when to wait, when to persist at trying to mend a situation and when to move on, when to gather more information and when to take a risk, when to develop a clearer vision and when to commit to a course of action. It is distressingly easy to avoid all this turmoil by telling myself I need only wait, and then ignoring it all.

Psalm 27 has a wonderful final verse that seems particularly apposite here:

“Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.”

It implies that there is good reason to wait at times if, through patience and prayerful restraint, we can better ‘tap in’ to God’s purpose and energy. Which is another way of allowing our imaginations to be “re-shaped”.